On Thursday the 15th May, Julia Eckhardt, an organiser in the field of Sound Arts visited LCC for a guest lecture.
Julia Eckhardt is a musician and organiser in the field of the sonic arts. She is artistic co-director of Q-O2 workspace for experimental music and sound art, and of Oscillation festival in Brussels.
She has performed and released internationally, and has been engaged in a number of artistic collaborations, among which extensively with composer Éliane Radigue.
Julia is (co-)author of books such as The Second Sound – Conversations on Gender and Music, Grounds for Possible Music, and Éliane Radigue – Intermediary Spaces/Espaces intermédiaires, among others. She is a researcher at the philosophical faculty at VUB Brussels, and has been teaching and lecturing on topics related to sound, music, gender, and space.
After this guest lecture, i took time to file through Julia’s works, particularly on her soundcloud. One piece that i found myself returning to was this viola piece titled ‘Mother Viola Study 1’, a piece consisting of viola, and the voices of others (Edyta Jarzab, Youjin Yeon, Angharad Davies, Ioana Mandrescu, Ensieh Maleki) scattered through out, delivering spoken word performances on top of the viola.
Another piece that i became quite interested in was ‘//2009// – what do you make of what I say?’.
The project //2009// – what do you make of what I say? involved ten sound artists who created a 7-minute piece in response to a composition by an unknown precursor. They were given no secondary information in the process, since the intent was to explore how exactly we perceive sound information when taken fully in isolation.
The project was carried out at Q-02 throughout the year 2009; the works are by Julia Eckhardt, Chiyoko Szlavnics, Mieke Lambrigts, Manfred Werder, Annette Krebs, Tim Parkinson, Olivier Toulemonde, Manu Holterbach, Aernoudt Jacobs and Anne Wellmer.
The aim was to investigate how we perceive music, in a more precise way than ‘I liked it’ or ‘it spoke to me’ and whether it is in any way possible to ‘understand’ experimental music. The proposition of the research-part of the project was that mis-understanding could lead to creative interaction, presupposing that there is an active and open listening.
I thought that this collection of pieces was great. It feels like an experiment for both the artists and the audience through the way in which we perceive music, and specifically experimental music. It feels like an ode to personal creative practice and the fact that despite everyone being given the same stimuli (a composition by an unknown precursor) the outcomes are all wildly different.
Leave a Reply